“Lucky it wasn’t stolen before we got to it,” said Noelle as she pulled away from the curb.
Clint shook his head. “No luck in it.” He peered out the window. “Not in this neighborhood.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Do-Good’s had eyes on us since this started. He’s been watching, or having us watched. I bet the same goes with the car. Anyone who looked too interested in it before we came along was probably moved away.”
“Moved… like, killed?” Noelle’s fingers curled so tightly against the wheel that her knuckles glowed a ghostly white. The light from the electronic dashboard displays cast blue-white glow against her face, heightening the feeling that Clint was looking at a dead woman.
And what does she see when she looks at me?
The same. Dead man walking.
Out loud, he said, “I don’t know. I doubt it. I think Do-Good’s only interested in killing the people who play his game.”
“Who fail it, you mean.”
“Huh?”
“Elena. She won. She got out.”
“Yeah.” Clint bit his lip. “She did.” He didn’t want to think about that. Not just because it reminded him that he was still in the game, but because the idea that she had won might give him hope. Hope was the most dangerous of feelings, because it was the only one that existed in places where you had nothing but hope… and so it was the only thing that could still be taken away.
He looked at the GPS. It scrolled up as Noelle took the first turn, allowing another line of directions to be seen. It was plugged into the dash outlet, but the device wasn’t part of the car. Just a small plastic rectangle hanging off one of the air conditioning vents. There were no buttons on the front, and when Clint pulled the device from the holder that clipped it to the vent, he saw no buttons on the back either.
“Do you have any idea where this is taking us?” he asked.
“No. Maybe Mr. Do-Good will tell us.”
Clint bit back a humorless guffaw. “I don’t think that he’s in the habit of helping.”
“No.”
They drove in silence after that. Turn by turn, they left the overbuilt center of Los Angeles and started out of the city proper. Every time that Clint left any big city – and this big city in particular – he always felt a sense of relief. Like he’d lived through some battle and now was on his way home. Or if not home, at least away from the front.
Not this time. As the skyscrapers diminished in the distance, he grew only tenser. He kept glancing at the watch – or whatever it was – on his wrist. Kept sneaking glances at Noelle’s watch, too, and at her collar. Like he expected any or all of them to beep for his attention, one last moment before light and sound would blast him to pieces.
But they were silent. Directions kept scrolling on the GPS screen, but other than that, Do-Good might as well just have been a dream. A nightmare. Or, worst of all, a memory.
And with that thought, he realized why he was so tense. It wasn’t just what had happened in the last few hours. It was what came next. It was where they were going.
He sat up straighter, looking around with something teetering on the edge of comprehension.
“What is it?” said Noelle.
Clint shook his head. “Not sure….”
“You know where we’re going?”
“No.”
Noelle looked at him, staring directly at him long enough that he started to worry about them driving off the road. Then she aimed her gaze straight ahead. Her jawline firmed. “You look like you know something,” she said. Her voice was flat. Clint knew that sound: the sound of someone who had just written him off. Who had decided he was a liar, or lazy, or any of a thousand red marks that went on a person’s soul when they had grown up in a system instead of a home.
Clint was used to seeing that expression, to hearing that tone. And was surprised to realize that it bothered him. It usually didn’t – not anymore. But he didn’t want Noelle thinking that of him.
“I have no idea where we’re going to end up,” he said. “But I’ve driven this route before.”
“When? To do what?”
Clint wanted to tell her. But he closed his mouth and set his own jaw. Something inside him whispered that telling her what he feared would make it happen; that saying it would make it so.
He said nothing.
He watched the turns scroll by on the GPS, watched the world pass by as Noelle drove. And that was how it felt: like the world was passing by. Like he was holding still, watching everyone and everything move past him.
Turn, turn, turn. The world spun on its axis, and spun the Mustang slowly closer to the place he worried – and then knew – they were headed.
“Clint, is this… is this where…?”
Noelle didn’t finish the sentence, and Clint didn’t respond to her unasked question.
The GPS stopped scrolling. The last line read: “Destination reached.”
Clint stared at that line in horror. “Destination reached.” Not normally the kind of thing that would strike fear into a person, but here… here it meant something much more final.
Noelle stopped the car, then turned off the engine. She looked around, and said, “What now?”
Clint couldn’t tell if she was speaking to herself, or to Clint, or to the undoubtedly-listening Mr. Do-Good.
“You know where to go,” said Mr. Do-Good, speaking again out of the microphones on their wrists.
“I don’t,” said Noelle. “What do you –”
“You know where to go,” Mr. Do-Good said again. “Don’t you, Clint?”
Clint didn’t answer. He just got out of the car and began walking, trusting that Noelle would follow as he pushed up the hill, swerving to avoid the blocks of metal and stone that jutted up from the ground like witch’s teeth.
Halfway up the hill, he began to run. His collar didn’t beep, which meant that Noelle must have kept up with him. But even if it had started making noise, he doubted he would have stopped running. He had to see. He had to know.
Then he did see. He did know.
He fell to his knees. “No… no… no….” The word came out as a whisper, a plea, a prayer. All of which went unanswered or ignored in the final moments of this long night.
3
Clint heard Noelle running after him, and heard her gasp as she saw what he saw. “Is this…?”
Clint shook his head. Not answering her in the negative, just denying that what he saw was real.
But it was real. He stared at a simple metal rectangle, set flush with the ground.
CLAIRE – 1999-2007
The words and numbers were short and to-the-point. Partly that was because the charge for the inscription had been per-character, but even if Clint had had millions of dollars to spend, he suspected he would have put nothing more than that. She deserved more, sure, but there were no words he could think of that would meet the level of praise he wanted to give her. So it would just be her name, and the dates of her birth and her –
(Death.)
– disappearance.
He had been there the day before Mr. Do-Good’s game. He had stood in this exact spot, and looked down at this exact plaque. Only the day before, it had been a plaque marking a long green rectangle, a gravesite covered by grass and a few wildflowers that waited to be found and trimmed.
Now, the plaque marked a different rectangle. Not grass and flowers, but dirt. The place Claire’s memory had rested was gone. She was gone.
“No,” he said again.
Saying it didn’t change anything. Didn’t change the fact that where a memory’s grave had been, now there only an absence. A desecration.
Beside the hole, a tall mound of dirt further evidenced what had been done: someone had dug up the grave and piled the dirt to one side. Two shovels – presumably belonging to whoever had so desecrated Claire’s gravesite – stood upright in the mound, blades shoved deep so only the handles stood visible.
Noelle
stared at the pile of dirt, her face a study in horror. “Your sister?” she murmured. Clint nodded.
Swallowing hard, he said, “Why would Do-Good do this? She wasn’t even buried here.” He looked at the empty hole. “The only thing here was a marker.”
He knelt and touched the plaque. It was cheap. It was all he could afford. It was precious to him. “I never found her,” he said. “She was there, and then she was gone.” Some of the lead in his gut seemed to move to his eyes as he felt the tears come. “I couldn’t even look for her. Not until it was too late, and the only thing I could do was give her memory a place….” His fists curled. “I wanted to kill whoever took her. Wanted –”
A muffled moan sounded. Clint stiffened, looking automatically at his watch as Noelle grabbed in semi-panic at her throat. The sound they’d heard wasn’t an electronic tone, but it didn’t belong in this place – so it had to be Do-Good.
The sound repeated. “It’s coming from over there,” said Noelle. She pointed.
The cemetery was nicer in the direction she pointed. The rich lay beside the poor in this place, as though whoever had designed it wanted it known that death was no respecter of persons, and the rich and poor would lay together in the eternities.
Of course that was a foolish dream. Because the cheap plaques in the area where Clint had buried his sister somehow became even cheaper when compared to the ornate tombstones and crypt-like structures only a few feet away.
The rich stay rich, even when they’re dead, he thought.
The moan repeated. Noelle took Clint’s hand and led him toward the noise. One of the larger tombstones – six feet long, nearly as tall. A name on it, which blurred in and out as the tears continued to flow even as he left his sister’s grave.
They went around the tombstone.
Mr. Do-Good was waiting for them.
4
Clint saw the man, and there was no doubt it was him. Same suit, same blood-smudged cutout face. But he wasn’t holding a phone or whatever he’d been talking into, ready to provide another impossible task. He wasn’t at a computer, programming the watches to spit out more bad news.
Instead, he was tied hand and foot, his wrists bound behind his back, his ankles crossed with the same heavy line. Another length of rope tied ankles and wrists to each other, then to his neck so that if he straightened out of a kneeling position he would choke himself.
One of his knees was… gone. A bloody mess through which Clint could see mangled flesh and the sharp yellow angles of shattered bone.
Do-Good was laying on his side, his head obscured behind the mask, which began to shake as they approached, the moans redoubling as he did so.
For a moment, Clint felt a surge of hope that wiped away the still-falling tears. The game was over! He didn’t know how, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered –
“I told you the nature of the game had changed.” Clint stiffened as Mr. Do-Good spoke. But not from the ground. His voice was coming, as it had before, from Clint’s watch. “But it is still going on.” Do-Good laughed from the watch, even as he writhed and moaned on the ground. “Final round! Last challenge: bury me! You have ten minutes!”
The countdown began.
On the ground, Do-Good kept shaking his head. He was moaning, but the moans had changed from the sounds of a man swimming out of unconsciousness to something more urgent. More terrified, but still muffled. They sounded like he was gagged behind the mask.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Clint whispered.
“Nothing about tonight has made sense,” said Noelle. “How do we even know it’s him?”
Mr. Do-Good’s voice again came from the watches, as Mr. Do-Good simultaneously continued moaning. “It’s really me. And I’ll add a bonus to this round: complete the challenge in five minutes or less, and I’ll tell you what happened to your sister.”
Clint had been shaking his head. But Do-Good’s last words transfixed him. A dark veil seemed to drop over his vision, and when it half-cleared he found himself dragging Do-Good by the ankles toward the empty hole. The man was no longer moaning, gagging noises now the only thing coming from behind his mask as Clint’s movements dragged the rope ever tighter around his throat.
Another darkness, in which he thought, I never buried her. I never found her. Now someone promises to tell me….
It made little sense. But Noelle was right: nothing about the night had made sense.
The darkness cleared again, and now Do-Good was laying in the place where Claire had never lain herself. Clint had a shovel in his hands, and started shoveling dirt over the man who had led them on this chase, who now craved death – a craving that Clint was happy to satisfy.
Noelle was watching, her hands jammed in her pockets, terrified. “What are you doing?” she asked in a small voice.
It was obvious what Clint was doing, but he knew she wasn’t asking about the fact – she was questioning something deeper. People, confronted with a truth so ugly and so inevitable that it shakes their worldview, are more likely to pretend that what they know is less important than what they feel. So they feel a need to deny what they see, and that denial becomes their reality.
That was what she was doing now. Noelle wasn’t asking what was happening, she was asking herself if it was real.
Is this real?
Can I do this?
“What are you going to do?” Noelle asked, her voice even quieter. Even lower.
Clint slowed. He looked at his watch.
6:14…
6:13…
What am I doing?
What am I going to do?
He slowed, but did not stop shoveling dirt over Do-Good’s rapidly disappearing form. He shoveled two more piles. Do-Good writhed.
What would Claire want me to do?
That was the real question, wasn’t it? She had come into his life as an orphan – another girl in one of the orphanages that came and went. A child so bright and so lovely that he adopted her as a sister. It wasn’t real, of course. Nothing was really real at all in a place defined by severed connections. But in her he found someone to love, and someone who loved him, and it didn’t matter that he was black as night and she as white as snow. It didn’t matter that she had blue eyes, he had brown, or that his hair was tight and close to his head and hers was blonde and straight and hung to the middle of her little back.
She was his sister. He was her brother. They promised to stay together, and on the rare times where they were separated, they had both acted so horribly that the foster parents were forced to return them to their group homes and they continued together until…
Until we went to sleep one night.
Until I woke up and she was gone.
(I can find out what happened to her! I just have to do this one little thing!)
He couldn’t do it. Claire was gone, and he had no doubt she was dead. But he knew she wouldn’t want him to know where she was if the price was another life – even one as worthy of extinction as Do-Good.
He slowed.
5:49…
Slowed.
5:48…
Stopped.
He looked at Noelle, who was looking at her watch, then shifting her gaze to Do-Good. “He’s the one who did this,” she said.
Clint knew what Claire would think; what his sister would say. “And he deserves to pay. But not like –”
Noelle rushed forward. She grabbed the second shovel and now she restarted what Clint had decided to end. She tossed shovelfuls of dirt onto Do-Good.
“No!” shouted Clint. “We can’t just kill –”
Noelle seemed to have become another person. “It’s all him!” she shrieked. “It’s all his fault! All this! He –”
Clint dropped his shovel and grabbed hers as she was about to drop another pile of dirt over Do-Good. She resisted, so he wrestled the shovel away from her. Twisted and turned and then the shovel was in his hands and she was ten feet away, fallen against another tombstone.
He turned and jumped into the hole beside Do-Good. The man had disappeared from the waist down. But he still groaned and writhed.
Clint reached out and flipped the bloody mask away from the man’s face, revealing a man who looked to be in his fifties, with a tan and a lack of wrinkles that somehow screamed wealth. His mouth was covered in duct tape, which Clint ripped off. It wasn’t like the movies: the duct tape didn’t just come loose easily. It came off in uneven strips, each one peeling a layer of Do-Good’s skin away with it.
“I won’t bury you, but I’m not going to leave your side. So you have maybe six minutes to turn off the explosives before we both go boom. Then you got about twenty more seconds to explain what’s going on. After that….” He worked the last bit of tape free. “… the story better be a damn good one.”
The tape gone, Clint would have expected Do-Good to start screaming in rage or madness, or to keep that strangely giddy tone he had spoken with throughout the nightmare as he laid out a new challenge, a new bit of the scavenger hunt.
He did neither. Instead, he looked past Clint. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, in a voice that Clint knew well – the voice of the man at the root of all the night’s death and pain. “What’s going on?”
Clint squinted, confused. He followed Do-Good’s gaze, looking behind him to see that Noelle had grabbed the shovel Clint dropped before. Dirt began raining down again – on both Do-Good and him.
“Noelle! Don’t do this!” shouted Clint.
He looked from Do-Good to Noelle. He didn’t understand, and something in his brain was finally shutting down, going dark. Too much confusion, too many horrible choices.
Do-Good started gagging as dirt – at least partially blocked by his mask before this – started raining directly into his mouth, nose, eyes.
Do-Good sputtered, then gasped as Clint clambered out of the hole. He shoved Noelle, trying to stop her from whatever mad course she had decided on. She went down on her ass. Clint tried to keep an eye on her and Do-Good at the same time.
“I’m not going to let you do this, Noelle. I won’t let you –”
Scavenger Hunt Page 22